Good Day Fellow Traders,

I noticed last week that I used the term “Rookie” quite a bit in the last few episodes of this blog.  Now, I understand that some of you in here will be bonafide rookies but I also understand that some of you, if you have followed this blog to this point, are no longer really rookie but legit traders at this point.  You have put the time into learning and practicing your craft and you have gained enough experience to call yourselves traders.  I congratulate you on this milestone and I am encouraging those who are still very new to keep going through the process as the rewards for the hard work are most definitely on there way to you.  I would also hope that you all have enough experience to realize that you never stop growing as a trader and that there are always new exciting things happening in the markets and in your own evolution.

In this weeks rendition of the rookie blog I want to recount a story of mine to illustrate that learning in trading never stops and sometimes this learning can be quite painful but when you come out the other side you will be battle hardened and to take on the next challenge that comes your way.

So when I was a rookie I started out more like an investor and less like a trader.  I got into stocks that were fundamentally sound, or at least I thought they were and I rode those stocks through good times and bad.  Now, a question one might ask is how good were the good times and how bad were the bad times?  Well, the good times were pretty great in my rookie estimation, I was running in double-digit returns for the first couple of years and I thought I was the master of the universe.  I was watching my account value skyrocket and I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I honestly thought “this isn’t so tough, anyone can be a trader if they just pick the right stocks.  I thought great stock picking was the key to riches.  Then came the bad times, the value of those once great stocks plummetted over 50% at their lowest point and I really didn’t understand why?  That was when I learned some very valuable lessons about the markets.  I learned that nothing goes up forever and that even if you have great stocks that they are subject to risk the same as anything else and that the need for risk management is paramount if one is to survive and thrive in trading or investing.  A fifty plus percent loss for some folks is enough to make them pack up shop and move onto another venture, however, me being me this spurred me onto to learn more and learn from the folly of my mistakes. I dove deep into risk management and I discovered my mistakes and I vowed to prevent them in the future and I did, at least when it came to the realms of trading stock.  The moral of this story is you don’t know what you don’t know but the market doesn’t care about that it will teach you just the same.  The only question remaining is, do you want to learn from the dollars in your trading account or do you want to learn from those who have been there done that.  I know that if you are reading this blog then you will take to heart the lessons the Tackle Trading coaches teach you and you will hopefully save yourself and your trading accounts a lot of heartaches.

In the next episode, I will tell you another tale of when the market reminded me I wasn’t all that until then take a look at the video below as we update our MRK trade and go looking for another.  Happy Trading!